Facing Medusa

A) Salvador Dali’s dream

1. This is an analysis of the painting:

The Dream gives visual form to the strange, often disturbing world of dreams and hallucinations. Ants cluster over the face of the central figure, obscuring the mouth, while the sealed, bulging eyelids suggest the sensory confusion and frustration of a dream. The man at the far left- with a bleeding face and amputated left foot- refers to the classical myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. The column that grows from the man’s back and sprouts into a bust of a bearded man refers to the Freudian father, the punishing superego who suppresses the son's sexual fantasies. In the distance, two men embrace, one holding a golden key or scepter symbolizing access to the unconscious. Behind them, a naked man reaches into a permeable red form, as if trying to enter it. [1]

B) Having a dream last night…

2. This is a dream I didn’t really have last night, but which I am trying to have right now, as I am writing these words. It is difficult to be awake enough so that you can control your logical functions in order to write something which makes sense, but at the same time be dreaming, delving thus yourself into an unconscious state, deep enough so that you also have access to the irrational functions of imagination and inspiration. In fact all artists have to do this all the time. Otherwise their work cannot be authentic. So what would be the supposed dream?-

“I was standing in front of the mirror, whose glass had turned into water, reflecting a Narcissus flower…”

3. I have always admired myself, and that has caused me a lot of trouble, because all my life I have been trying to be pleasant to other people. Being always pleasant has as a consequence- that you never tell others the truth, as truth is most of the times unpleasant. Such a fear of rejection in fact divides all of us. On one hand, we want to be polite to others, but, on the other hand, many times we want to say it right to their face: “You are wrong. You don’t know what you are talking about. You are a complete idiot…” Thus, finally, we suppress the emotion, and we become ugly ourselves. Truth is always petrifying:

“…The Narcissus flower turned into a fish, which slipped under the watery surface of the mirror. I felt that the water was like sweat, covering my trembling body. Then the water turned into a sticky substance, and the glass turned into ice. I could see the fish trapped in the ice- my own petrified reflection- with its mouth wide open. Forever still…”

C) The tale of Medusa

4. This is a related article:

It is said that Medusa was a monster generally described as a winged human female with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Gazers upon her face would turn to stone. Medusa was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head, which retained its ability to turn onlookers to stone, as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield.

Also, in a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid, Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena’s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. [2]

D) The process of petrification

5. While petrification- turning somebody into stone- can be a common way in mythology or folklore to escape your enemies, either by turning them or even yourself into stone, in the field of art the aspect of petrification is related to still lifes:

The tradition of still lifes goes far beyond Surrealism. Still-life painting as an independent genre or specialty first flourished in the early 1600s, while still-life motifs occur fairly frequently in manuscripts, books of hours, and panel paintings of the 1400s and 1500s. Many of the objects depicted in these early works are symbolic of some quality of the Virgin or another religious figure (for example, the lily stands for purity), while other objects may remind the viewer of an edifying concept such as worldly vanity or temperance. Moralizing meanings are also common in independent still-life paintings, which range from such obviously didactic works to rich displays of luxury items. [3]

6. While still lifes in painting represent the attempt of the artist to depict the moving three dimensional world in the painting, and to immortalize the human view about the infinite and the eternal, all the personifications of our inflated ego and the hilarious expressions of our vanity, sooner or later, will turn into the stone of the statues-

“You cannot exist forever alive…”

7. You cannot be aware of everything which is going on in the universe. You have to select a few things, and keep them in your mind consciously. You can think of those things as if they were stars. The more you focus on a star, the brighter it seems to be. But if you try to look at all the stars at the same time, then all the stars will become faint, while the sky will turn into an unvarying milky substance. This is how our mind works. It is possible that all the knowledge of the universe lies in our unconscious mind. But for all this knowledge, we have to select a few things which will compose our memories, our immediate surroundings, and our own personality-

“Elusive universal processes in the background of the mind, moving fast, yet standing still…”

E) The fear of castration

“The dream…a huge, heavy head on a threadlike body supported by the prongs of reality… falling into space just as the dream is about to begin.” [4] 

Salvador Dali

8. When Dali met Freud, he showed him a painting of his (Metamorphosis of Narcissus). Freud praised the artist’s authenticity and made an exception for Dali concerning the contempt he felt for surrealists in general:

“Up to now I have been inclined to consider surrealists, who seem to have chosen me as their patron saint, as incurable nutcases. The young Spaniard, however, with his candid, fanatical eyes and unquestionable technical skill has made me reconsider my opinion. In fact, it would be very interesting to investigate the way in which such a painting has been composed.” [5]

9. Freud’s general contempt for surrealism was probably based on his unconscious repulsion toward his own perversions. This is an example:

Little Hans (i.e. Herbert Graf) was a 5-year-old boy with a phobia of horses. The first reports of Hans are when he was 3 years old when he developed an active interest in his ‘widdler’ (penis). When he was about three and a half years old his mother told him not to touch his widdler or else she would call the doctor to come and cut it off. When Hans was almost 5, Hans’ father wrote to Freud explaining his concerns about Hans. He described the main problem as follows: “He is afraid a horse will bite him in the street, and this fear seems somehow connected with his having been frightened by a large penis.” Freud and the father tried to understand what the boy was experiencing and undertook to resolve his phobia of horses.

When he was first asked about his fear Hans said that he was frightened that the horses would fall down and make a noise with their feet. He was most frightened of horses which were drawing heavily laden carts, and, in fact, had seen a horse collapse and die in the street one time when he was out with his nurse.

When Hans was taken to see Freud, he was asked about the horses he had a phobia of. Hans noted that he didn’t like horses with black bits around the mouth. Freud believed that the horse was a symbol for his father, and the black bits were a moustache. After many letters were exchanged, Freud concluded that the boy was afraid that his father would castrate him for desiring his mother. Freud interpreted that the horses in the phobia were symbolic of the father, and that Hans feared that the horse (father) would bite (castrate) him as punishment for the incestuous desires towards his mother.

The case study of Little Hans does appear to provide support for Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. However, there are difficulties with this type of evidence. Hans’ father, who provided Freud with most of his data, was already familiar with the Oedipus complex and interpreted the case in the light of this. It is therefore possible that he supplied Hans with clues that led to his fantasies of marriage to his mother and his new large widdler.

Over the next few weeks Hans’ phobia gradually began to improve… [6]

10. However, I find it hard not to notice that Little Hans had indeed seen a horse collapse and die in the street. Thus his fear that a horse might fall upon him, or that a horse might bite him, was not based on some wild fantasy of his, but on reality- if he had been close to the horse which collapsed, he might have been hurt. The subsequent improvement of his phobias were not the product of some elaborate and effective therapy, but of the mere fact of growing older- finally realizing that not all horses might collapse and fall on him.

11. Thus life is not all about sex. It is also about horses. It is how we treat our beloved everyday objects, so that we transform love into a form of art. I personally find it ridiculous to envy or be afraid of horses because they have a large penis. But even if I did so, I would accept such a fear as an enjoyable thought to play with:

“The bigger- a dream- the better…”

F) Having now another dream…

12. This time I wasn’t sitting in front of my mirror. I was having a journey to the center of the universe- yes, according to that intuition the universe has a center-. There, at the center, there was a supermassive black hole, having the face of the Medusa- having her mouth open, and her hair composed of snake-like beams of light. Many other particles were  going in and coming out of her mouth. For a moment, as I came close to her glowing face, the strong attraction grabbed me, my face touched her face, and as I sunk for a moment into the liquid surface of her event horizon, I could see in a flash the whole history of the universe unfolding in my mind.-

13. “Then all the expressions froze…

14. …Facing the horror of universal emptiness…”

15. I would never have fully recovered from that very vivid dream…

G) “…Then a subtle breeze began to blow among the flowering fields...”

[1]: [https://www.dalipaintings.com/the-dream.jsp]
[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa]
[3]: [https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nstl/hd_nstl.htm]
[4]: [https://gun-violence.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.5.855]
[5]: [https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.5.855]
[6]: [https://www.simplypsychology.org/little-hans.html]

9/21/2018

Painting: The Dream, Salvador Dali